“Well great!” In the stock room he crossed out the Kyle written on the breast of his T-shirt and scrawled Julie beneath it. Then he took off his shirt and gave it to Julie.

“That’s it?” she asked.

His tongue squirmed between his lips and his gums. “Nope. We gotta celebrate.”

That night they went to the beach and smoked weed from a pop can. Julie’s lungs were a fiery mess. The moon, a white stamp on the sky, looked melted and dripped in the water.

“Are you crying?” he asked.

She touched her face. She was. They looked at the water. No, she didn’t want Kyle to walk her back home, but thanks. They reclined. Arms nudged. Feet grazed. Soon they were tangled, clumsily rolling, loose sand sticking to skin. She unzipped his jeans.

“Spit on it,” he said. She licked her palm, spittered it. Strained breaths. The rustle of jeans cuffing ankles. A fart? Goop on her thumb as his dick twiddled fishily. He crammed wet paper into her hand then ran toward the dunes. “Don’t tell anyone!” He vanished into the night.

She held what he’d given her up to the moonlight. A twenty dollar bill.

 

 

A muggy summer stretched its legs into September. Life on the coast had compressed her desire to leave until it became something hard and impossible. Walking home from work every day — distractedly tripping in divots, getting honked off the road — she imagined the sequence that would bring Theo back to her. First, she needed to save enough money to return to Whitfield ($1,500, for a used car, rent, and deposit). In Whitfield a week would pass — no, a month — before she chanced upon Greg, sitting alone in that café near campus with maps of the Oregon Trail drawn on its walls. She would tell him what happened. He’d